Am I ready for my greatest loves to be dissected? No.
But here I am with the thing in which I live and breathe and am. Love.
Love is definitely not my greatest expression but it is my favourite expression. My evolution of 'loving' has gone from being solely centred around another individual or individuals to being centred at my core. What I mean by that is, I stand in love now. I am grounded in the safety of how its nuanced force shows up for me. I say ‘I love…’ not as a subconscious rhetoric to appease my reflection but as an intentional indication of how I feel about myself first and then all of my loved ones.
I LOVE LOVE! In all its forms, I am a love enthusiast!
Amanda Seales said once in an interview that “A revolutionary woman’s love will not be one passively.” This brings me to how I learnt to love. I learnt a lot about the action of love through a friendship in 2012. I always identified it as a feeling and not as an action. My friend knowingly and unknowingly taught me how to love wholly. She is the revolutionary woman in the statement above that by her being allowed me to witness and experience a love that wasn’t passive. I tell her to date that she taught/teaches me how to love ‘loudly.’ I’m still working on it but we’ll get there. Love is actionable, love is subtle, love is loud and love is my vow.
I’ve been intentional in my friendships for a little over 5 years and I’ve experienced love that feels like an abundant forever. I’ve been in a relationship now for almost 3 and a half years and I’ve experienced the intricacy of love that feels like magic. I am a sister, daughter, cousin and niece that has consistently felt a love characterized but consciously choosing unconditional support.
I say all these to explain the grandeur and nuance of love and the consistencies it has held in various aspects of my life. I wrote a portion of this ode during June of 2020 but decided to rewrite it and further explain why we must show up as vessels of love for the things and people we say to love. My love often shows up through written words because what I’m not able to vocalize I am able to materialize on paper.
In the month of love, February, which happened to be my birth month, my friends, partner and family personified love as an action word. I write to express love, but I was written to and affirmed of their love. When people tell you they love you, BELIEVE THEM. I struggled with this for a long time because of unaddressed trauma that stopped me from feeling like I could give my all to people. This fear did not serve me. But what did serve me was the baby steps of intention I was willed to immerse myself in by those around me. I needed a love: intention intervention.
If love for you, like me, is not your greatest form of expression in your day-to-day, this is yours just as much as it is my intervention to be intentional in all your loves. Be it work, health, family, relationships, passions and more. Firstly, allow yourself to be loved. Secondly, accept that where there is love there can also be pain. Thirdly, take small actionable steps every day to affirm yourself. And lastly, be intentional about loving on the love around you in any way you can.
I love you; I see you; I hear you.
Love,
Sometimes she writes
[If only I got a dollar for the amount of times, I used the word love today]
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